The promotion of sustainable practices by the chemical industry is focused on lowering energy usage, recycling raw materials, and reducing by-products produced during the production of goods. However, the chemical industry vitally depends upon petroleum and natural gas as basic feedstocks. Given the state of optimization associated with major petrochemical processes, a significant shift in feedstock use and manufacturing designs will be required to lower energy, emissions, and costs to below their current level. Biotechnology offers a new approach for the production of industrial chemical intermediates and end-products from renewable carbohydrates, such as plant derived sugars, or other renewable feedstocks such as fatty acids. In addition, biotechnology also offers a way to utilize waste or low value streams such as glycerol from biodiesel production, or to transform petrochemical-derived feedstocks such as benzene, toluene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to useful products in bioprocesses that are more benign to the environment than existing chemical processes.
US2010/0203600 and WO2011/031147 are incorporated by reference in their entirety. There is a need in the art for cost-effective biosynthetic routes to chemical intermediates to nylon-7, nylon-7,x nylon-x,7, and polyesters and the end-products nylon-7, nylon-7,x nylon-x,7, and polyesters especially from a variety renewable and non-renewable feedstocks.